Familiarity
by TeaLogic
Summary: The facts stand as they are: Sherlock did something he likes to call 'Pulling A Mycroft', the showerhead in the bathroom is dripping, Watson is angry. A short three-part 'traditional' Reichenbach/return fic. [Spoilers for Season Two]


Familiarity is a concept that takes the form of a double edged sword.

It's even more so for the addict. Him. He's the addict. Full of association, triggers, memory- familiarity can cut him clean in half, like splitting powder into lines. The sword swinging, a flash of steel in a heavy downward notion and the needle punctures the vein and fills his bloodstream with toxin. That is the filthy sharp edge of the sword. The one he keeps fully turned away from him for as much as possible.

And then there's the other side. The clean edge. One that makes smooth swipes in the air. There is a sense of routine and processes and of course, relationships. For some reason it's all a little harder to define, why this familiarity is better than the others. Why seeing a particular smile envelops a sense of warmth that has nothing to do with external temperatures.

Familiarity is rife in his work. People as a whole are a familiar lot. Acting averagely. All containing the same forms of motives, ideas, notions. His deductions are made from the bedrocks of near identical, connecting information. Little webs of patterned behaviour utilised to predict -but in no way is he a profiler, he will not hear such _apparent_ blasphemy.

Familiarity is also an element that doesn't take the form of a weapon at all. Away from all the elaborate metaphors with language to match is the undeniable fact that familiarity just exists. Self made but not able to be destroyed. Like time, almost.

Familiarity is also Watson. But recently that's required a closer scrutiny.

Sherlock accepts the job at MI6. They ring a day later to say they will be in touch soon with an assignment.

* * *

The reason why for accepting the fake-but-then-real offer at MI6 was because it was that or heroin. Simple enough. The tension was rising in his veins. A helplessness or uselessness was firing off rockets in his brain and making his whole system wanting to become as big as the night sky so it could take in the powder and smoke. That little packet of heroin encased within his books was beginning to smoulder and it now burned against his clothes. He needed to put out the fire.

Sherlock has felt the blistering desire of relapse before. Of course he has. Every recovering drug addict will think that there is a living narcotic creature boiling away in the blood at least a couple of times. If they don't, they're either liars or not human, and Sherlock has seen both at recovery meetings usually manifested in the same person. They all talk about it over and over. Familiarising themselves with the train of feelings which then culminates in a hit and then a train wreck of disappointment.

But this is where it's going wrong. Where the pattern refuses to act accordingly. Sherlock is feeling the biting pain of disappointment before he's even had the opportunity to even take the drugs. _And_ he has to debate and consider that Joan Watson can be disappointed in him in ways other than a relapse.

* * *

Since Mycroft left, Watson has been sleeping uneasily at night. Sherlock has just stopped sleeping at all. He sits in his chair pondering dangerously to himself at three in the morning. His hands curled around a file that MI6 sent him a few days ago. He lets his eyes drift to the ceiling.

He thinks about how eighteen months is a long time. People who never so much as brushed shoulders in the street can create a whole new shade of life together within that time frame, making all the landmarks like marriage and so forth in whatever order they choose. And yet Sherlock feels that after eighteen months, he's only just started with Watson. Scratched at that surface. He's gone at it the wrong order. Detailing the little things within weeks; cataloguing seven pairs of ankle boots and the correlation between the amounts of sugar in her tea to the time of day. He completely missed the truth about her father until she told him a year later.

When he looks at her as a whole, it scares him, just how much he truly doesn't know.

He's scared even more because he knows he's let her down. He can't face the disappointment, knowing that he is the source. How would he love to say that it was all Mycroft; lazy, irrational _ridiculous_ Mycroft who had wrecked everything... but he couldn't. Not now. He knows he's done things wrong. He can't pinpoint where and how and why, but there is the knowing and it drives him to do the thing that he does best: running away.

Joan Watson wants to leave, but not run away. Yet for some reason, Sherlock sees this as a result of his failures, and he cannot- _will not_- see it any other way. He forgets readily that he originally told her that she didn't have to stay at the Brownstone. That day in Bell's flat where he's sure the sunbeams poured through the windows and Joan looked a perfect picture of order, a lightning storm around her neck. He forgot the offers he made her, the choices.

Sherlock does not have much time to tell her what he's done. But he doesn't feel ready yet. He thinks that he's only just sussed things out properly. Discovered why they've drifted apart. It's not Mycroft. Mycroft was... _is_... merely a blip. Just dust that settled in between the cracks that were already there. Watson had been kind, telling him that she thought the relationship needed to be evened out. But of course, Sherlock takes a dramatic take on her mild space metaphor. He runs away with it wildly, elaborating, expanding- turning this into more than it is.

He sees Joan Watson as the sun. A perfect, blazing, life giving ball of clarity. The biggest and brightest star in the universe. Without the sun, the Earth has nothing to revolve around. All would wither and die. Total devastation. And what if the sun itself should implode? Unable to take the weight of the planets around her? And she nearly did- _she nearly did. _Those men, the scourge of the earth, would have put a bullet in her brain and wiped her out of existence within an inch of second.

Sherlock doesn't want to see an apocalypse he's dreamed that would happen and so he runs away. His fingers tighten around the papers in his hand.

He will tell Watson tomorrow.

* * *

He tells her three days later about the job and his first assignment. They have an almighty row. The worst by far. The walls of the Brownstone appeared to shake and tremor at their raised voices and all living things within a six mile radius seemed to run for their life. Clyde retreated to the back of his terrarium for the entire time. No one likes it when the parents argue.

Of course, scrunched up, tightly bound bottled fury never did anyone any good, and god knows Joan Watson had as much as Sherlock at that moment. She was not nursing a broken heart over Mycroft, but something more powerful, more undefined. She felt played with, toyed with, not considered after years of being on the back burner. She merely didn't know who to blame and that angered her even more.

Sherlock was never meant to be her target, but he was the one who steamed ahead and painted a bull's eye on his chest with this MI6 business. They went back and forth, slinging terrible accusations. Mycroft's name was of course dragged in because ever since he did leave to go and 'die' or so to speak he really hasn't gone away. But they didn't stop there. Every complaint, every iota of issue was pushed to the surface, no matter how painful.

They wound up in the kitchen, worn out and empty of things to say. Joan leaned against the counter. Sherlock was bent over the kettle, having started the process of tea but too frustrated to make his hands work. They clenched and released as if they ran on a clockwork mechanism. He glimpsed at Watson staring into nothing, her hands gripping the counter.

Sherlock prides himself on words, his three languages, his intricate nuances within his sentences. He couldn't put it plainly to her that day that he is absolutely terrified about having her in his presence and having her not in his presence. That he wishes Mycroft never graced their doorstep. That he _cannot _figure how to be a better person, how to lose... whatever it is that makes him _him. _

He tried again to make his hands busy, to ignore that he felt hot to the touch and that sweat was pouring out of him. He went for a spoon and made his mouth work again, but sure to be determinedly not looking at her.

"I'm not stupid, Watson." His voice was quiet, a drastic change from the battle before.

Her gaze slid to look at him.

"If at the end of all this, the first and final problem of our relationship is a result of me being a burden on you, then I plan to remove myself and you of that affliction."

He made himself look at her then. Begging her to understand... something. He was sure that he found the right word with _burden._ It was instinctual to him; she'd used it to describe him somewhere down the line. Whether to Mycroft or to someone else. There's no choice with gravity. Physicists have struggled with it for centuries.

"You've..." Joan looked down at the floor suddenly, confirming Sherlock's thoughts. "You've misunderstood."

"Have I?"

She didn't strive to refute him. He had chucked the spoon in the sink and it rebounded with a pathetic clink. Tea ended up abandoned. The conversation even more abandoned.

They now float about listlessly.

* * *

All Sherlock can think about is that she didn't cry. Not like she did with Mycroft. He wondered at that something chronic later. After she went out and didn't come back for a day and he stayed on the roof for a mighty number of hours cursing the bees. _Her_ bees.

He knows their status as two people escapes conventional or 'mainstream' definitions. He's always been rather ludicrously proud of that. He did do a bare bit of research a few weeks after she agreed to become a detective and then never really cared. 'Partnership' was a generic enough label, and he thought it was enough to cover them. Watson always did the further explanations anyway.

A label didn't solve their argument. Four days later and it's the day he has to leave. They've barely spoken. Watson simply watches him as he packs a spare amount of clothes. And then the car appears outside. No ceremony. He has told no one else. He feels a terrible pang of guilt as he realises that he has automatically left Watson to take care of that. That was a part of him being a problem, wasn't it?

She doesn't say goodbye. Neither does he. She just takes his hands and squeezes them hard, as if he was on the brink of dying.

"Don't do this."

And then she lets their hands drop.

If she had said another sentence, another plea, he would have stayed. But because she doesn't and because Sherlock doesn't really know how to take direction without her, he picks up his holdall and walks out the door. He acts as he planned it out in his head.

* * *

It goes drastically wrong after two months.

That's all he needs to process. It's gone wrong. MI6 was a huge mistake. The assignment was poorly prepared and no amount of his execution of it could save it. The organisation he has been trying to uncover in Paris has seen straight through him, as if he was glass and now they want his head. Literally. The threat comes across in a cryptic email as he sits in a dingy hotel room. It takes a few minutes to work out the message but then there's nothing shadowy about the attachment. His mouth drops open in horror at the seemingly ordinary if slightly blurry picture of a woman outside a library in New York.

They know about Joan. They threaten her and he fires up in a rage. No matter what he tries to do, the apocalypse intends to happen in one form or another. But Joan _cannot_ be harmed. He wills rationale. He has to be smart, to do this right. To go beyond what they want.

It takes a day for him to get the contact details he needs. She picks up after the second ring.

"I need you to kill me."

_"Well,"_ Jamie Moriarty's voice is trained to disguise her surprise, _"there is a charge for those services." _


End file.
